The ambitions, dreams, failings, and innermost thoughts of a diverse group of passengers are revealed as they travel aboard a bus along the backroads of California

"This is a random universe," Reacher says. "Once in a blue moon things turn out just right." This isn't one of those times. Reacher is on a Greyhound bus, minding his own business, with no particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there. Then he steps off the bus to help an old man who is obviously just a victim waiting to happen. But you know what they say about good deeds. Now Reacher wants to make it right. An elderly couple...

Loomer, Texas, twelve-year-old Ivy Green, whose mother may have run off with a charismatic preacher to Panhandle, Florida, and classmate Paul Dobbs, who wants to see a Space Shuttle before the program is scrapped, team up for a summer adventure that is full of surprises.

The seventh graders of McQuarrie Middle School and their Star Wars-inspired Origami finger puppets go on a field trip to Washington, D.C., on what proves to be a very long trip full of shifting alliances, betrayals, carsickness, and sugar rushes.